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How Bloggers and Content Marketers Can Generate Unlimited Video Ideas

Paul’s Note – today’s post came about following an exchange of emails with Adrienne from www.AdrienneSmith.net. We got to talking about video and Adrienne asked me if I could help her with something that she was having some problems with.

And that something was this: “How do I come up with ideas for videos?”

Now not only is this is a text post here on Da Spoon, but I also turned it into a video that you can go watch at Adrienne’s blog.

Now before we go and look at three ways that you can not only come up with ideas for videos, but come up with limitless ideas, I just briefly want to talk for a moment about why it’s vitally important to come up with video ideas.

And not just topic ideas – but ideas that will resonate with your audience and more importantly, attract new members to your ideas.

The Importance Of Consistency In Video Marketing

The biggest reason why you should create multiple videos – and consistent posting schedule – can be found on Page 15 in the YouTube Creators Playbook. In their own words, Youtube say:

Now YouTube is not the only way to use videos in your video marketing efforts – but it’s a big part of any video marketing strategy. And if YouTube themselves tell us that we need to create frequent videos….well, we’d be pretty dumb to ignore that.

Plus there are plenty of other benefits to creating multiple videos too:

the more content you have, the more chances there are for people to find you (Marcus Sheridan calls this ‘The Law Of Compound Information)

greater exposure to your expertise increases your authority

the more videos you have optimized correctly,the more chances you have to appear in Google’s Search Engine results as well as YouTube’s

the more overall views you have, the higher your channel will be ranked. This positively affects how Google and YouTube return your videos in search results

videos are easily shared…leading to greater exposure of your brand and authority

But the biggest benefit of creating a consistent posting schedule is this:

In most niches very few people are doing it yet. So getting started NOW will give you a market advantage over your competitors.

Video Is Only Getting Bigger…And Bigger

Video is not going away. As mobile devices spread – and internet access gets cheaper and faster – the importance of video is going to grow. Cisco Systems estimate that by the end of 2013 around 90% of web traffic will be generated via video.

So in my opinion you’ve got to get started with video. And you’ve got to be thinking about a publishing schedule for videos in the same way that you have a publishing schedule for your blog.

And to commit to a regular publishing schedule for videos requires that you can conceive of multiple topic ideas to make videos about.

And that leads us directly to the main body of today’s article, and the part of today’s article that I turned into video/presentation format.

The Three Step Process To Generating Unlimited Video Ideas

I’m going to show you a three-step process to come up with endless video ideas – each step of the process can generate ideas on its own, but what I really like about this process is that the steps can be used to sequentially to:

(a) define what information your target audience wants to know

(b) get a good idea what they’re actually searching for AND watching, and

(c) drilling down on a topic area to find a virtually limitless supply of ideas that you can use to make videos.

The three steps in this process are:

(a) The Target Profile Interview

(b) Doing Research on YouTube itself, and

(c) Amazon.com

Let’s get started with the first step of the process – the target profile interview.

PART 1 – THE TARGET PROFILE INTERVIEW

So before we look at the target profile interview, let me quickly define exactly what a target profile is.

A target profile is a real person – not an imagined persona – and is someone who you would like to have hundreds, or thousands, or more of in your subscriber base, or your client base.

When you settle on your target profile, here’s what you do: you get them on the phone and interview them. And during the interview the important information you want to find out is what are the pain points that your target profile is experiencing?

Understanding what your Target Profile’s pain points are gives you some great starting points for creating content.

Now this video came about because Adrienne of Adrienne Smith.net asked me how she could come up multiple ideas for videos for her YouTube channel.

For the next step in the process she summarized her target audience/target profile as people who were very interested in blogging with all its associated questions like: what are the best opt-in offers, how to get more engagement, how to drive more traffic. And – and this is the area that we’re going to work on – she also has a lot of ‘newbies’ amongst her audience.

Now Adrienne hasn’t done a target profile interview to my knowedge – yet. But I aim to persuade her that she should do one.

Until then, the information she has provided gives us enough areas to move forward to the next step.

Step 2 in the process is to head over to YouTube.

PART 2 – YOUTUBE

Now YouTube as well as being the Daddy of video marketing – is also the second most popular search engine on the Internet.

And by taking pain points we get from our target profile interview we can check on YouTube what videos have already been made that address these pain points – and how many times they’ve been watched.

This is obviously important because if you’ve got a topic that’s being watched by your audience in the tens of thousands, you are far more likely to get significant traffic back to your blog from your videos than if a topic is only being watched by a few hundred people.

So knowing that Adrienne’s audience contains newbie bloggers we can search on YouTube for topics that would interest them – if you search for Newbie Bloggers you’ll see that the videos that come up don’t have many views on them.

Now when you do a Target Profile interview you’d have a list of pain points to explore. And newbie bloggers – almost by definition – are people who are just getting started out with blogging. And the bulk of them will be using the WordPress Platform – and there’s a good chance that they’ll be struggling with various aspects of mastring wordpress.

So look at the results when I type ‘WordPress Tutorials’ into YouTube:

If you ignore the top two results – these are ‘Promoted Videos,’ which is what YouTube calls their version of Pay Per Click – then the two results under have great viewer numbers. And if you duplicate this search on YouTube you’ll see that the videos underneath also have good viewer numbers.

So creating WordPress Tutorials is clearly going to be a subject that interests newbie bloggers/Adrienne’s target profile – AND is being searched for and watched in good numbers on YouTube itself.

Caveat: What constitutes a ‘good viewer number’ on YouTube varies from niche to niche. A popular video in my bass guitar market area would be 50,000 views or above. But in a much broader field like newbie blogging, when you’re doing research you’re looking for viewer numbers of 100,000 plus IMO.

Now the next step is to take the pain point/topic that we’ve identified and convert it into multiple ideas and head over to Amazon.com.

STEP 3 – AMAZON.com

Now you might be thinking: isn’t Amazon a bookstore? How is that going to help make videos?

Well it won’t help make videos – but what it will do is help brainstorm video titles. And here’s how.

Continuing with the theme of WordPress tutorials for newbie bloggers – let’s search for books that teaches WordPress for beginners, and then when we get those search results look for books with the ‘Look Inside’ icon above the thumbnail:

That ‘Look Inside’ icon tells you that you can search some of the books contents. And usually that includes the piece of information we want – which is the Table of Contents:

And if we scan down the table of Contents there are literally dozens of potential ideas here for potential videos. Each of these sub headings of each chapter could potentially be a video in a series teaching WordPress for Newbie Bloggers:

The Copyright Question

Whenever I’ve taught this concept, people always say: Isn’t this a breach of copyright.

The answer is a clear NO.

We are not – repeat NOT– buying the book and reading the content. All we are doing is using the Table of Contents as an idea for topics. You don’t have to make a video to equal every chapter of a book. And you don’t have to use just one book. There are plenty of good WordPress books on Amazon that you could search the table of contents for.

So this ISN’T a copyright breach – it’s a very quick way to brainstorm literally hundreds of topic ideas.

SUMMARY

What’s great about this three step process is that in the target profile interview you find out what the pain points are of the kind of people you want on your list, or you want as clients.

In Step 2 you head over to YouTube and verify that there are videos out there that address these pain points – and that enough people are watching them to make your investment of time in creating videos worthwhile.

And in Step 3 you use Amazon to really build out your topic lists by scanning the Tables of Contents as a way of brainstorming ideas.

Now the example I used today – Adrienne and her newbie bloggers – is a fertile one. Because you could probably make 50 videos on various different aspects of WordPress. Not every topic will yield 50 videos. But your original Target Profile interview should yield anywhere from 3 to 5 pain points that you can build out.

Once you exhaust those topics, then choose a new Target Profile and repeat the process. As you get more experienced in the process you’ll quickly find that you’re never short of ideas to create videos from. And if you’re going to do video marketing – and you should! – you need to create a regular posting schedule as part of your video marketing efforts.

Following this process will ensure that you’re never short of ideas for your target audience.

Your Shout

If you have any questions please post them below – that can be about any part of video marketing too. I’m going to be talking about video marketing a lot more this year….and creating more videos like the version of this post that you can see at Adrienne’s Website.

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